Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Fairy-Tale Matchmaker

Cory is miserable as a tooth fairy. Her mother loves the work, but Cory finally reaches her breaking point and quits. She moves in with her uncle and starts looking for other jobs even though she knows the tooth fairies are angry with her. She has other problems as well-- her pet woodchuck likes to eat carpet and shoes, she is in a struggling band, and she's just broken up with her boyfriend (as have some of her friend) and is looking for the perfect guy. Her odd jobs find her babysitting for Humpty Dumpty and for the Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe, killing spiders for Miss Muffett, and helping Suzie inventory sea shells by the sea shore. When the Tooth Fairies start playing dirty and start sending plagues of bugs that disrupt her odd jobs, Cory goes delving into her family history for some answers to who she really is and what sort of job would be best for her.Strengths: No one does a fairy tale book as well as E. D. Baker. I adored A Question of Magic and am quite pleased with The Wide-Awake Princess. This has the same modern, fun twist, this time on predominately Mother Goose characters. Weaknesses: There seemed to be a disconnect between Cory's problems (jobs, boyfriends, fights with mother) and the age of the expected readers. I was also more bothered than I should have been that this included characters that were not in Mother Goose. It's all make believe, so it shouldn't matter!

I can tell what my primary source of Mother Goose was as a child, because illustrations from Mother Goose Rhymes, illustrated by Eulalie, published by Platt and Munk, circa 1953, kept popping into my mind!

Plus, I now have a really overwhelming desire to go to a Storybook Forest. I thought theme parks like that, as well as Northpole, New York, were the coolest thing ever when I was small.

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Because this blog is aimed at librarians and patrons of school libraries, I will not review books that are published solely in e-book formats. Books should be available in hardcover or library binding through library suppliers such as Follett. Books should fall within the target demographics of this blog.